Mihail Sebastian, „Oraşul cu salcâmi” – evadarea în spaţiu utopic: Note de lectură

The aim of the article is to highlight how the writer Mihail Sebastian created the evasion in an imaginary realm in the first novel he wrote. The novelist was interested in different ways to dissimulate the belonging to the realness. He aimed at eluding the guide marks of reality through the devise of parallel worlds whose characteristics are accessible and meaningful only to heroes initiated in the instinctive cult of evasion. Utopia is both an ideal space in the imaginary (the dreamland, Eutopia) and a “place that does not exist” (“no-place”) when literally translated from Greek. Thus the entire literary work of Mihail Sebastian orbits irresolutely between fairy play and farce. The space of the evasion the fiction writer imagines is not a faraway exotic realm, but a niche disguised in the daily life. It is impossible to locate by the outsiders and from its interior the initiated evade even the idea of affiliation to the objective reality. The heroes from Oraşul cu salcâmi (The Acacia Tree City) isolate themselves, claustrophobic and autistic, out of their own will in an oasis which involves, to them, the sum of all necessary potentialities. Proscripts or misfits, they outline instinctually – never cerebrally – a false but self-sufficient world where lie in wait indeterminate and indefinite.